And how do you fund all this, make it attain an economic life of its own? That's the big problem with all micropayment schemes. They sound good until you try to work the business plan, then they prove themselves impossible because it costs 2c to handle each penny. And more if issues such as collections and enforcement (e.g., against frauds) is taken into account. This is why, for example, we have a postal system which manages postage, rather than some scheme whereby every paper mail recipient charges every paper mail sender etc etc etc. On February 16, 2005 at 12:38 camera_lumina@hotmail.com (Tyler Durden) wrote:
Wrong. We already solved this problem on Cypherpunks a while back.
A spammer will have to pay to send you spam, trusted emails do not. You'll have a settable Spam-barrier which determines how much a spammer has to pay in order to lob spam over your barrier (you can set it to 'infinite' of course).
A new, non-spam mailer can request that their payment be returned upon receipt, but they'll have to include the payment unless you were expecting them.
This way, the only 3rd parties are those that validate the micropayments.
-TD
From: Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> To: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> CC: cryptography@metzdowd.com, cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Re: How to Stop Junk E-Mail: Charge for the Stamp Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 17:29:05 -0500
Oh no, the idiotic penny black idea rides again.
Like the movie "War Games" when a young Matthew Broderick saves the world by causing the WOPR computer to be distracted into playing itself tic-tac-toe rather than launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
It was a MOVIE, made in 1983 nonetheless, get over it.
More seriously, what attracts people to this penny black idea is that they realize that the only thing which will stop spammers is to interject some sort of economic constraint. The obvious constraint would be something like stamps since that's a usage fee.
But the proposer (and his/her/its audience) always hates the idea of paying postage for their own email, no, no, there must be a solution which performs that economic miracle of only charging for the behavior I don't like! An economic Maxwell's demon!
So, just like the terminal seeking laetrile shots or healing waters, they turn to not even half-baked ideas such as penny black. Don't charge you, don't charge me, charge that fellow behind the tree!
Oh well.
Eventually email will just collapse (as it's doing) and the RBOCs et al will inherit it and we'll all be paying 15c per message like their SMS services.
I know, we'll work around it. Of course by then they'll have a multi-billion dollar messaging business to make sure your attempts to by-step it are outlawed and punished. Consider what's going on with the music-sharing world, as another multi-billion dollar business people thought they could just defy with anonymous peer-to-peer services...
The point: I think the time is long past due to "grow up" on this issue and accept that some sort of limited, reasonable-usage-free, postage system is necessary to prevent collapse into monopoly.
-- -Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*
-- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*